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People Who Get All Their News From Fox Really Aren’t Being Very Smart

There isn’t any excuse for getting all your news from Fox. Or from any one source, whether it’s the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC or any other outlet. In fact, it’s really pretty stupid of us.

It’s also a sign we’re more interested in having our beliefs supported than in discerning the truth or weighing the evidence. But, as we know, that pretty much describes humans; we all suffer from that tendency.

But we know it’s a weakness of ours. So why not try to compensate for it?

People who value evidence and earnestly seek the truth, even when it has the potential to undermine our beliefs and may be deeply unsettling, do not look only in one place for information. They seek information and knowledge wherever it is to be found. And reject the naive belief that it could possibly be found in only one place.

Indeed, there is no excuse for looking in only one place in the age of the internet. We have the world at our fingertips. It’s wonderful!

With little to no cost, we can access different sources of information. Different perspectives. Different views. Different interpretations, grounded in different life experiences.

It’s wonderful!

Part of the reason we’re in the predicament we’re in today is because people don’t believe this. Rather, they’re certain they’re right. That their perspective is the only right one.

They think they know more than they do. They think they know more than is possible to know.

Rampant hubris and arrogance, it is. Self-delusion of extraordinary proportions.

There really isn’t any excuse for the level of stupidity we’re experiencing today. Yet it’s real. And there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight.

I for one believe in the eventual triumph of knowledge and wisdom. But that’s a bias, too. A mere hope undermined by the evidence that history provides.

Yet we have made progress. Superstitions of ages past have been discarded. Discoveries have yielded dramatic improvements in the human condition.

People aren’t smarter or wiser than we were 2,000 years ago. But many people are better off and are living longer. And have much greater opportunity and potential for a comfortable life.

The power of discovery and knowledge. Indeed, the power of human curiosity and our species’ insatiable desire for more knowledge and deeper understanding.